It's the Fourth Anniversary of Sandy Hook. Here's What We've Done to Stop the Next One.

Four years ago today, a group of parents waited inside a firehouse in Newtown, Connecticut, to learn whether their children were still alive. They had dropped their kids off at Sandy Hook Elementary School that morning like any other day. Shortly afterward, a gunman entered and killed 26 people. Six were teachers and school administrators; 20 were children, most of them six years old and none older than seven.

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It was an act of unspeakable horror, a human catastrophe. It was a moment to acknowledge our common humanity, to try to understand how the perpetrator lost all sense of his, and yes, to adjust our collective attitude toward deadly weapons. And now is a moment to consider whether we have made any substantive changes to the laws governing who can buy a firearm, or what kind of weapons an ordinary citizen is allowed to own.

At the federal level, nothing has changed. A bill proposed by two senators, Democrat Joe Manchin and Republican Pat Toomey (both of whom carry 'A' ratings from the NRA) to expand background checksfailed in the Senate in 2013. The bill sought to close loopholes allowing anyone to buy a gun in venues like gun shows without passing a federal check examining their criminal record and (a limited account of) their mental health history. The bill won 56 votes in favor, enough to pass but not to overcome a Republican filibuster threat.

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Nine out of ten Americans supported expanding background checks at the time, but too many senators folded to pressure from the NRA, which falsely claimed the bill would create a federal gun registry. (The bill's language explicitly outlawed the creation of a federal registry.)

The same day, a bill to reinstate a version of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban also failed in the senate, earning just 40 votes. A bill to limit the size of ammunition magazines—large magazines are a major factor in more deadly mass shootings, as shooters do not need to reload as often—also failed, with 46 votes. A bill backed by the NRA to clarify gun-trafficking laws failed too, with 58 votes. Meanwhile, a measure allowing someone with a concealed carry permit in a specific state to carry nationwide—a perhaps unprecedented single-bill expansion of gun rights—got 57 votes, failing narrowly. In every case, some Democrats facing reelection joined Republicans to help defeat the legislation.

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Congress did pass the Mental Health Reform Act of 2016, which provides funding for expanding access to mental health care and to teach educators about the signs of mental illness. The bill was backed by Sandy Hook Promise, a group founded by victims' parents, which lobbied Congress for it extensively. The Sandy Hook shooter, did not receive mental healthcare in the years leading up to the incident.

At the state level, a few things have changed. Connecticut, where the shooting happened, passed some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. (Violent crime has since dropped 23 percent in Connecticut between 2012 and 2015, and from 2014 to 2015 the state saw its lowest number of incidents since 1967.) Seven states have passed laws creating universal background check systems since Newtown: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, New York, Connecticut, and Delaware. (11 states already had them.) In these states, people cannot buy a gun if they have have a history of mental illness or criminal activity.

Seven states and Washington, D.C., have passedbans on assault weapons: California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, New Jersey, Maryland, New York. The same states have bans on high-capacity magazines, those that hold more than 10 rounds.

The resulting patchwork of state laws, while better than nothing, is insufficient. After all, one of the contributing factors to the out-of-control violence in Chicago, which heavily regulates guns, is that it's next door to Indiana. Of 50,000 illegal guns recovered by Chicago police between 2001 and 2012, 22,000 came from within Illinois. The rest were trafficked in from out of state, including nearly 8,000 from Indiana.

There has been a tendency towards defeatism in recent times, best encapsulated by a heart-wrenching tweet from last year:

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

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